


no more warmth, now she’s not home

by ottermo



Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Introspection, i love my son :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 02:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14761082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: Max has been alone before, but not like this.





	no more warmth, now she’s not home

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from “Brighter Day” by Noel McKoy, which you might recognise due to the Humans soundtrack being really, really cruel.
> 
> _“The sun don’t shine for me any more_  
>  _Since my sweet girl, that I loved, walked out the door_  
>  _Stormy clouds surround me, inside I’m feeling oh so cold,_  
>  _So much rain, so much rain in my heart_  
>  _No more warmth now she’s not home”_

_I know you can’t hear me,_ says Max into the darkness, his lips not moving to form the words out loud. _I know you’re not there. But I don’t know how to do this without talking to you_.

Once, he had prayed to a nameless god and begged safe passage for his family. Still, he had lost Fred. Today he had sent Leo away and his sisters had left of their own accord, seeking out danger. There is only one person Max can talk to about such things. Only one person who knows who his family are, what losing them means.

 

_I think it unwise to go on without a confidante, but I cannot tell Anatole the truth without endangering him too. Besides, he could not replace you. No-one could._

 

Her smile dances through his mind, a crystal-clear image, and he is partly glad to have saved these files in such high definition, partly bitter that he cannot recreate her in any other way. In Max’s mind she is perfect, shining, unblemished. She always will be.

She will only ever be so, that’s the problem.

Her joy lives on, Anatole had told him.

 _Her joy lives on._ It was meant as comfort. Her joy lives on because she cannot, and because he will not call up the memory of her hanging from a tree, or lying prone on the table. Her joy lives on because it’s all he can bear to remember, and that is not immortality, it’s a lie by omission that he can’t stop telling.

 

 _I am lost, my love. At every turn there is another impossible decision. I tell myself that I bear these things so that our people do not have to, but they must all live with the consequences of my choices_ , _as long as they are within these gates._

 _And even when they are not_.

 

He can still conjure the sensation, the hard metal of the truck under his fingers, his hand so close to Leo’s yet worlds away. His brother, still. He had been Max’s brother before he drowned – only for a few months, but that was how it started.

 

_I had to hurt him. He could never be safe here. Even if Agnes hadn’t given me an ultimatum, would he have stayed in that room now he’s awake? Of course not. He wanted to help us. He’s never left me of his own accord. Both times it has been my doing._

_He would have tried to come back. I cannot risk that._

 

Leo is not the bridge he once was, not in ways he can prove by bleeding blue. He is not a bridge, and Max will not let him be burnt in an attempt to prove otherwise.

 

_The best way to love him is to let him think I don’t. I am unpracticed in this. To care for him is my default, the one programmed for me and the one I have always chosen._

_I used to be able to choose for myself, and now I must choose for us all._

_I wonder what you would have advised, had you been there the night Christabel was near to death? I cannot extrapolate well enough. Your very presence would have changed the paradigm entirely, and that troubles me._

 

He recounts it, when pushed, as an honest question of probability. A straight play according to the odds.

And it had worked, hadn’t it? Leo lives. They both do.

 

_I’d like to think my choice would have been the same had you been there, for I still think it was the right one. I would love to think that I have never been one to play favourites._

_The truth, perhaps, is less noble._

_What’s the use of having favourites, if they will be snatched away all the same?_

_Why place value on those closest to my heart, in a world that does not love them as I do?_

_Had you been there, I might have hesitated. I might still have chosen Christabel. But I might not. I’ll never know for sure._

 

She is there in his memory bank, a sad, slow smile of sympathy, a hand on his shoulder, the touch of her forehead against his. She is so close.

 

_I know you cannot hear me._

_I know you aren’t there._

 

Everything is silent. Only the guards are awake, manning the perimeter until their relief comes at morning’s first light. The rest of Max’s people are here, inside, charging or preserving power in sleep mode.

Max ought to do the same. But he cannot part from her, cannot banish her as he had the others. She only lives while he thinks of her, so how can he ever stop?

 

_I know you are gone, but I don’t want to believe it. I may never believe it._

 

If his sisters know of his loss, they have not spoken of it. For this reason, he hopes they know nothing; that Mia had merely overlooked the absence, and Niska had not realised there was anyone to miss. In any case, they have both left now, and they may never return here.

In their wake, he is more alone than he has ever been, surrounded as he is by a people he has lied to. He has let them believe he is no different from them, beyond his status as their leader. Perhaps that would be better.

 

_I know you can’t hear me, but I must say it just the same._

_I love you, Flash._

_Whatever else I must lose for the good of our people, I will not lose that._

 

 


End file.
